Page 89 of No Asylum Here

But no words came.

All I could do was reach for her before crumpling to the ground. The last thing I saw as my vision faded was Rook slamming the needle into Tuesday’s exposed ass. Her mouth opened on a scream, but no sound came. Nothing but the mad thing sounded in my ear.

“She’ll survive. She’s strong. We’ll find her again.”

The mad thing’s promise, knowing it didn’t like to make those, was the anchor I needed. I held it close to my chest as the void rushed in to take me.

Chapter Forty-One

Tuesday

Blinding pain lanced through my jaw, my teeth grinding together as I put every sliver of willpower into biting back the screams of agony shredding through my body.

It wasn’t because of the large needle slamming into my ass cheek, or the cruel laughter as an orderly held me down for his boss with his gargantuan hands on the back of my head—muttering how easily he could crush my skull. Or even Rook, taking my panties and shoving them in my mouth to gag me.

The pain came from what I’d just watched.

Mal fought for me. H–He said he loved me, with his last dying gasp.

As much as I wanted to believe that he couldn’t truly die, it was a tall task to believe the impossible. Especially when proof of the logical lay before me, bleeding into my office carpet.

There was no question of it, looking at the lifeless body.

Mal was dead. Gone.

Just like that, the hole in my heart was bleeding all over again—with nothing but hatred to fill it now. Hatred and regrets.

My eyes shut tight. I wanted to crawl in on myself and never emerge from the darkness.

The injection was brutally painful. While the first dose had barely been more than an ache in my ass for a few days, and the general trauma of not knowing what was being injected into my body, there weren’t any other downsides.

This one, though? It hurt like a bitch.

The fluid itself burned, as if drain cleaner had been poured inside me, punching through my vascular system.

“Sonofafuck!” I hissed into my panties.

Convulsions racked my body. I barely heard Rook’s voice cutting through the fog shrouding my brain, ordering another orderly to hold me down.

Then another.

And another.

Why did it take four grown men to hold down one woman for a shot?

My mind kicked on, whirring at full speed, while my sensory input was a beat behind. It took a handful of terrifying seconds to grasp that I wasn’t having a seizure or a stroke. My body thrashed hard because I was fighting back, and I was overpowering them.

“That’s right, Tues. Let me take over. I’ll gut them for taking him away from us.”

I blinked.

It was the voice from before.

If I were still hooked on the pain pills, I wouldn’t have thought much of the voices. Hearing voices wasn’t that much of a walk from the hallucinations I’d been experiencing since Lauren Hawkin’s death.

But I hadn’t taken the drugs in weeks—at least by my estimation.

No, it wasn’t that. There was no evidence beyond what I was experiencing first-hand, and my lucidity was debatable. What was certain was my gut feeling. It was rarely wrong. And my gut feeling was telling me that the voice was a side effect of the Treatment.